There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister's Husband, and He Hanged Himself (9 page)

The Adventures of Vera

V
era turned sixteen, and nothing but scenes followed, one after the next. Her father begged her to have some self-respect, not to fall to pieces over every stranger. He even threatened to send her to a juvenile facility but, in the end, didn’t act soon enough. When Vera was twelve, her teachers observed that her mental development lagged behind her extraordinary physical maturity; one of them, who respected Vera’s father, told him she couldn’t imagine what would happen to Vera when she turned fourteen. But Vera did turn fourteen, and fifteen. At sixteen she quit school, without asking anyone, and apprenticed herself as a junior salesgirl at a department store. Vera’s coworkers haloed her with gentle understanding and slightly patronizing friendship, agreeing that she wasn’t all there.

Often they said to her, “Greetings from Ivan the Fool!” They were referring, of course, to love, for what else could girls of eighteen talk about? They discussed other things, naturally: books, weather, terrible accidents in the city, injustice and deceit, their childhoods, the constant ache in their feet, and problems at work. But mostly they spoke about friendship and love, tried to analyze their feelings, applied intuition or simply closed their eyes to everything and cried their hearts out, and gradually, in the course of those conversations, acquired a protective layer of hardness that sealed their mouths and left them to fight their grown-up battles alone, wordlessly.

Vera’s father didn’t understand the benefits of such friendship, considering it unhealthy for Vera. When Vera announced that she was ready to leave the store, he agreed, despite misgivings, to arrange a position for her at his institute. The father was understandably afraid that after four years behind a sales counter, in a corrupting atmosphere of intimate women’s talk, Vera might go a little cuckoo from the institute’s abundance of men, might be willing to bestow her trust on any man—any man, of course, other than
him.

Barely a month after Vera started at the institute, her father was informed that Vera’s coworkers found her behavior odd to the point of indecency. She carried on long conversations over the office phone, wore too much makeup, giggled loudly, and, in general, behaved as if she were at a party rather than a place of work. The first thing she did, her father was informed, was type a personal letter, on the office typewriter, to a certain Mr. Drach. Vera thanked Mr. Drach for returning five rubles and apologized for not agreeing to disclose her friend Tatiana’s address without her permission. Vera’s father considered the dates in question and decided, with no small relief, that the letter to Mr. Drach must have referred to details about Vera’s recent vacation at a country resort, and did not represent a new crisis.

Soon enough, however, he learned that Vera was pursuing an employee in her department, a married man who had invited her for a car ride one night but the next day avoided her and then had to ask a coworker to tell her quietly, “Now’s not the time.” Yet Vera continued to follow him around, demanding an explanation! She moped over this aborted romance, as she thought of it, for weeks. She couldn’t have known that the man’s wife, a former ballerina, had found out about their little excursion and made a horrible scene. No one told Vera anything, including her father, who felt determined to have a little talk with her but, as before, couldn’t work up the nerve.

While he hesitated, another employee, a rising star in Vera’s department, asked Vera to stay late to take dictation. About this young man, it was known he had recently filed for divorce, on the grounds of childlessness, and that he lived alone, without his parents, in a condo in the suburbs. The next morning Vera returned to the office convinced she had experienced a life-changing romantic event—she had found the love of her life, a future husband. She cast mysterious looks around the office, and trembled with anticipation. This employee, however, behaved exactly like the first one, as if Vera reminded him of something unpleasant that he wanted to forget. When one of his colleagues, a woman, mentioned to him that Vera was crying and was ready to quit the institute, he told her (the exact quote was reported to Vera’s father), “Let Vera bring me a doctor’s note saying she’s healthy; then I’ll do it.” He said this in front of everyone. They all laughed. Again, poor Vera didn’t have a clue. Imagining that someone had informed him of her unfortunate car ride, she hung out in the corridors and halls, looking for a chance to reassure him—nothing had happened that night in the car, none of it was her fault, nothing was ever her fault, and so on. Vera would have dumped her entire biography on the poor fellow—or anyone else, if they had cared to listen.

Her father was absolutely determined to open Vera’s eyes to the reality of the situation, to clarify the circumstances and motives. But he was afraid of Vera’s reaction, and besides, none of his past explanations had done much good. For a long time after her disappointment, Vera performed her duties automatically, ate very little, went to bed early, and read a lot of poetry. To her friends she admitted she had lost interest in living. She felt like an old woman.

Between this disaster and the final, decisive romance from that period of Vera’s life, there was a brief friendship with another one of her coworkers, a man of very short stature who always winked and smiled at Vera, and called her Miss, and tried to steal a kiss when no one was looking. This man, who was known in their department for his prim manners, entertained Vera with sexual anecdotes and once brought her an illustrated volume on the subject. Sitting on top of her desk in her little nook, he relaxed, cursing out everyone in the department and making personal phone calls that made Vera blush. All this, too, ended on an odd note, but not before Vera became fond of his visits and learned to think of him as a close friend.

When the man asked Vera to help him buy a warm coat (it was impossible to get one off the rack in his size), Vera raised a flurry of activity among her friends in retail, and arranged for him to pick up a fine, imported coat in a certain store, at a certain time. On the day of the appointment, the little employee didn’t come to work. Vera called his office number all day at regular intervals, announcing in the same flat, official voice that it was Ms. Vera calling about the coat. At first her calls were answered with muffled laughter, then simply ignored. The next day the little employee read Vera a forceful lecture on the subject of appropriate behavior in the workplace, after which he stopped what he called Vera’s “education”—the jokes, sitting on her desk, and so
on.

This insignificant episode shook Vera to her core. She felt she’d been abandoned by a fiancé, whom she had come to like and even find attractive, despite his obvious shortcomings. Her father received a full description of the incident: how the little employee’s officemates doubled up with laughter during Vera’s calls; how the next day they all congratulated him on becoming the latest victim of Vera’s prowess; and how, on hearing about this, the married employee with the car talked about Vera with disgust and almost malice, while the department’s rising star also made ironic comments, although not as harsh, restraining himself out of respect for his female colleagues. Nothing the little employee could say about his real need for a coat stopped the giggling; finally, he gave up and, when no women were present, made a remark so dirty that his audience choked with laughter.

* * *

Vera fell in love with the head of her department when he returned from an overseas business trip and asked her to type up his report. All through the dictation he interspersed amusing little comments about the trip and its participants, as if only Vera with her superior taste and understanding deserved to know the real facts. Vera was smitten. Never before had she been addressed by a superior with such complete trust, as an equal. She didn’t consider, of course, that her boss simply wanted to deploy his charm on a new employee, or that, like most men in his position, he needed from time to time to feel the spontaneous adulation of the lowest ranks. Isolated in her nook, barred from general staff meetings, Vera wasn’t aware of the atmosphere of jealousy and of love for the boss (absolutely platonic) that permeated the entire department; nor was she familiar with his notorious habit of alternating charm with outbursts of the deepest cynicism in his personal relationships with his employees. During the next dictation, the boss grew even more relaxed and had a playful argument with Vera about some movie whose name they couldn’t remember. The loser had to fulfill a wish; Vera lost. With a mix of anxiety, regret, and bubbling joy, she prepared to give all of herself to the man she loved. But the boss didn’t ask for anything like that. Instead, he quickly wrapped up his report, grabbed his briefcase from his office, and practically ran home.

Over the next few weeks, Vera waited for a phone call or a note. After another sleepless night she called his office from a pay phone and asked for an appointment. This in itself was a strange request—employees at Vera’s department dropped in on their boss at any time, without formalities. The boss agreed, however. He told Vera to come by at the end of the day and to knock slowly on his door three times. Vera showed up at the appointed time and stayed for more than an hour, talking and talking about herself, as if a dam had burst. The boss listened with interest, saying now and again, “Fascinating” and “I’m going to study you.” At the end of her monologue, he agreed to meet her for a date later that night, adding that they must leave the building separately, in case someone might see them and think God knows what.

As her father might have warned her, Vera waited for ninety minutes at some tram stop, in the cold, in a remote blue-collar neighborhood where her boss must have spent his factory youth. Luckily, she had another date planned for later that night, and also luckily, that young man waited patiently for her. Vera’s evening wasn’t entirely wasted.

Eros’s Way

A
t work her nickname was Pulcheria, after the meek and faithful wife in Gogol’s famous story. Pulcheria was a model spouse by nature, but that hadn’t stopped her husband from making a certain acquaintance at a vacation resort, after which came anonymous phone calls and threats that the lady would “take gas.” The closing act was the appearance of a mutilated photograph of Pulcheria outside her door. In the epilogue Pulcheria was left alone, raising two daughters.

When her younger daughter married, Pulcheria aged rapidly, almost willingly, her lovely eyes and innocent soul withdrawing beneath heavy flesh, seemingly forever. Her soul still flickered on occasion—at work, for instance, where she cared deeply about her little subject. She fell ill when a new boss swooped into their division like an evil genius, threatening to ruin years of painstaking research. That was when Pulcheria and her colleague, Olga, formed a strategic alliance and became friends.

This Olga, for whom work was her life, hated their new boss with a special intensity. At home, people said, Olga had a sick husband who was hospitalized routinely, and, they added, her only son had married an older woman, had a baby with her, and now demanded one-third of the parental apartment. Olga fought ferociously. In the end the young family settled into a tiny room in the woman’s parents’ house. Olga lost her rosy complexion but remained in her palace, with her sick husband.

One evening Pulcheria stayed late at the office—earlier in the day she had been invited unexpectedly to Olga’s house for a birthday party. She called her daughter (who lived with Pulcheria) to give her instructions for the night but continued to worry about her and the baby; in retrospect this seems almost funny because only a day later she would barely remember their faces or anything else from her previous life. Everything happened so fast; she seemed to have gone to sleep, or else to have lost her mind from shock, as her colleagues (Olga among them) believed. When she left the office, she began following in Eros’s way—of which she hadn’t the slightest awareness.

At the party Pulcheria wound her way into a dark corner and sat there quietly, while the hostess and her coiffed girlfriends set the table in the dining room (Pulcheria couldn’t even count the rooms in that fabulous apartment). She understood Olga’s motives for inviting her—she always understood people’s true motives, to her discomfort. Olga simply wanted to crush Pulcheria with the glamour of her party, then oust their hateful new boss with Pulcheria’s help (there were only three people in their division), and, finally, get herself appointed in the boss’s place.

Pulcheria was angry with herself for wasting her whole evening on this party where everyone and everything felt alien and uninteresting to her. But she was angrier with their boss, who intended to turn their archives into a profit-making tabloid featuring personal letters and who-slept-with-whom exposés. The employees nicknamed the boss Tsarina and quickly figured out that she intended to write her doctoral thesis from their research. They also discovered that she’d been installed there by her husband, the deputy director at a sister research institute, who, in turn, found a position for their own director’s nephew, an equally useless careerist. Knowing all this made them want to cry from shame and hopelessness—but what could they
do?

That’s why Pulcheria observed the surrounding luxury with indifference, using the party as simply a chance to take a break from the daily drudgery she suffered behind her perfect image of a plump, almost ancient grandmother—though Pulcheria was no more than two months older than youthful-looking Olga. Pulcheria recklessly played at old age at a time when quite a few women picked themselves up and stayed in shape for a long time. Olga, for instance, recently had made herself look even younger with the help of cosmetic surgery. Pulcheria felt a little scared of Olga’s taut face and avoided looking directly at it, a habit Olga interpreted as an admission of inferiority. One could see through Olga at a glance, while Pulcheria was shielded by an ironic guardian angel who understood everything about everyone—which was why Pulcheria just sighed when their third colleague, the genuinely young Camilla, made some wisecracks about Olga’s surgery. Incidentally, Camilla had not been invited to Olga’s party. Olga had probably decided that in her war with the boss, Pulcheria was a safer bet than the rebellious Camilla, who, by the way, would not have wanted to waste an evening with old hags. She had other plans, dreams to pursue, so let’s not worry about this Camilla—she didn’t come to the institute from the street, either; she, too, had relatives in the right places.

After whiling away in her corner, Pulcheria joined the other guests at the dinner table and continued her inconspicuous existence. She nibbled and drank a little until she realized the guest on her right was asking her name. She told him, and they began to talk about a certain scholar whose life happened to be Pulcheria’s special subject. The scholar had been exposed and denounced; these days his name was mentioned only pejoratively, but Pulcheria knew and loved him as an etymologist might love a bug she’s discovered, even if it’s harmful. In a quiet, reserved voice, Pulcheria firmly dismissed the pejorative note in her neighbor’s tone. Her neighbor brought up some familiar arguments, but Pulcheria didn’t want to debate a layman and just sighed. Only once did she bother to correct him, and her correction was so elegant and to the point that the guest looked at her intently as if seeing her for the first time. Pulcheria, too, focused her tired eyes and through her exhaustion saw a missing front tooth and blinking pale eyes; but what she really saw was an innocent, dreamy young
boy.

The guest kept looking at Pulcheria and smiling. There are people who smile at everything and everyone, and one shouldn’t take their smiles personally, but this man smiled with a purpose. He smiled in admiration of Pulcheria’s intelligence, of her brilliant conversation, and as a result Pulcheria fell in love—a pitying, tender love.

She blossomed, her angelic soul delivering a ray of kindness, and thus the matter was settled. Quietly but firmly Pulcheria described her scholarly pursuits, but the subject of their conversation was of no importance; only the essence mattered, and the essence was that these two people had found each other at a noisy dinner table, while their hostess flew to the kitchen and back, beaming with purple blush on her new cheeks—although on one of her trips she did stop to whisper something loudly in the guest’s ear. A loud whisper of this kind usually carries an insult for the person nearby, but Pulcheria understood nothing of what was said. When Olga left, their conversation resumed, and when Pulcheria got up to leave, the guest followed her to the door, changed out of his house slippers and into winter boots, and walked out with her. They walked to the metro station in the crisp, cold air, and somehow Pulcheria wasn’t embarrassed by her coat with its hanging threads or her balding fur hat, which she’d been wearing since college. Her face shone; her eyes opened up; her guardian angel worked his way to the surface through the layers of aged flesh.

They walked down the steps to the train. He rode with her to her station, and then they walked again, for a long time, all the way to her door. There he kissed her hand, then left. They didn’t exchange phone numbers. Pulcheria didn’t even ask his name. She disappeared into the dark entrance, thinking of nothing, but later that night she woke up in despair, realizing she couldn’t ask Olga anything about him, not even his name.

The next day Olga got into another scrape with their boss, who asked her to fetch a folder from the file cabinet, even though they were in the same room. A hissing exchange ensued, an exchange that Pulcheria, absorbed in her dreams about the Stranger, missed entirely. Olga seemed to avoid Pulcheria and didn’t invite her to lunch, either sensing Pulcheria’s new indifference or feeling indifferent herself. Nonetheless, Pulcheria brought her tray to Olga’s table. In spite of her decision not to ask any questions, she immediately asked, “So how did it
end?”

“What do you mean,
how?”

“Well, I did leave early. . .
 
.”

“Ah, who cares about washing dishes? But what do you think of her? Treating me like her secretary! And who is she? Just the wife of our idiot director’s friend. And she thinks she can boss us around!”

Olga then made a short speech about her own connections, which she had, it turned out, at the highest level; and speaking of husbands, her own husband was still very much respected as a mathematician, despite his illness.

“What’s wrong with him?” Pulcheria asked indifferently, still hoping to shift the conversation back to the party, to the Stranger.

“The worst,” Olga announced. “Schizophrenia.”

Pulcheria felt she had to say something comforting.

“I don’t trust such diagnoses,” she said calmly.

“He’s had it for a long time, it turns out. He complained about his stomach, lost a lot of weight, quarreled at work, and then they didn’t pass his thesis. . .
 
.”

“But what’s so crazy about it?” Pulcheria asked. “Dissertations don’t make it through committees all the time!”

“At the hospital he was smashing his fist into the wall. They thought it was from some sort of pain, but then they asked me, and I told them everything. He was calling for you, they told me, for Anya.”

“Anya?” Now Pulcheria was really listening: it was as though Olga were trying to tell her something. She didn’t yet know that her entire future was outlined in this conversation.

“That’s right—Anya. As if anyone ever wanted him except me. At least he doesn’t have my office number; at my previous job he called ten times a day. A jealous
nut.”

“So how are you coping?” Pulcheria asked weakly.

“How? At least he’s still okay in bed or else I’d hang myself, that’s how. Did you notice the men at my party? My lovers—all of them. And their wives are my friends. So what shall we do about this bitch?”

Olga’s story confronted Pulcheria with the shadowy, murky aspect of life where photographs get mutilated and then dropped on family doorsteps. These disturbing thoughts alternated with waves of misery. On the outside Pulcheria appeared to be processing the same old letter over and over. Later that evening, approaching her house with heavy grocery bags, she saw at the darkened entrance his uncovered gray head. Casually and simply he appeared before her. They walked to her apartment. The young family’s room was dark and quiet; either they were walking the baby, or all three were resting before the sleepless night, because the baby often cried between three and five in the morning. The kitchen was strewn with drying diapers. Pulcheria invited the guest into her neat little room, which was furnished with shabby but genuine antiques: her grandmother’s little round table, and two bookcases with old books. The guest began looking through the books. Pulcheria brought some tea and fried potatoes; they ate in silence. The guest was absorbed in a book. He read a little longer, then got up to leave. They didn’t touch. After he left, Pulcheria took the book from the table and pressed it to her breast.

Every night after work she flew home, skipping groceries. She cleaned, cooked, and scrubbed, barely understanding what she was doing. She couldn’t eat, and lost a lot of weight. He came every night, always bringing the same pastry. They had tea, then he read to her or scribbled formulas. Her daughter and son-in-law quickly got used to the visitor and greeted him politely but didn’t linger with conversation, so purposeful did he look, as did Pulcheria when she arrived home to greet
him.

At work Pulcheria kept her nose to her desk. Olga lost interest in her. In a reverse move, Olga joined forces with Tsarina against young Camilla, who was always late or on sick leave but otherwise got her work done and indeed recently submitted a substantial article. Eventually it became clear that Camilla was expecting a baby and needed to keep her job until her maternity leave. Tsarina and Olga started a search for Camilla’s replacement and interviewed candidates right in Camilla’s presence. Poor Camilla tried to protest but continued to swell and barely dragged her feet. Clearly Olga and Tsarina needed a constant target for their warfare, and at least it was Camilla for now, but Pulcheria knew her turn would come eventually. A rumor spread through the institute that Pulcheria wasn’t all there because she was late with her reports, never came to the cafeteria, and spent her lunch breaks buying groceries. But how could she write her reports if
he
sat in her room every night like a rock? She worked at night, and in the morning she dragged herself to work, where she scribbled meaninglessly on her index cards, barely awake.

After eight weeks of this, her mystery guest vanished. Three horrible days later Pulcheria forced herself to go to the cafeteria and to join Olga and Tsarina at their table. They were glad to see her and advised her to get a consultation with a good shrink (Olga offered her contacts). Tsarina praised Pulcheria’s article, which was finally finished; Olga praised her thinness; and then the two resumed a conversation that almost made Pulcheria faint.

“So I won’t be here till lunch,” Olga announced meaningfully.

Tsarina replied that she could do as she wanted.

“Because, you see, he is in the ward for the violent, where he can easily be killed—the orderlies can do it. He needs to be transferred to the second floor, where they know him. Where he is now they’ll make him a vegetable or an impotent.”

Tsarina smacked her lips in sympathy.

“When I called the ambulance, he wouldn’t go peacefully and screamed for help—that’s why they put him with the violent.”

Here Pulcheria asked whom they were talking about.

“My husband,” Olga said. Her cheeks were ashy. “And guess what he yelled? That I was his enemy! He tried to push the window out with his head, cut himself, and then our cat ran in and began licking his blood like a cannibal. . .
 
.”

“How did it all begin?” Pulcheria asked, barely breathing.

“The usual way: he started to disappear from home, then come back a day or two later, dirty and hungry. . .
 
.”